As well obviously working with VirtualBox, OpenSolaris can also run as a guest domain under Xen. The installation CD ships with the paravirtual extensions so you can run it as a fully para-virtualized guest. This provides a significant advantage over fully-virtualized guests, or even guests with para-virtual drivers like Solaris 10 Update 6. Of course, if you choose to, you can still run OpenSolaris fully-virtualized (a.k.a. HVM mode), but there's little advantage to doing so.
One slight wrinkle is that Solaris guests don't yet implement the virtual framebuffer that the Xen infrastructure supports. Since OpenSolaris doesn't yet have a text-mode install, this means that to install such a PV guest, we need a way to bring up a graphical console.
With 2008.11, this is considerably easier. Presuming we're running a Solaris dom0 (either Nevada or OpenSolaris, of course), let's start an install of 2008.11:
# zfs create rpool/zvol # zfs create -V 10G rpool/zvol/domu-220-root # virt-install --nographics --paravirt --ram 1024 --name domu-220 -f /dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/zvol/domu-220-root -l /isos/osol-2008.11.iso
This will drop you into the console for the guest to ask you the two initial questions. Since they're not really important in this circumstance, you can just choose the defaults. This example presumes that you have a DHCP server set up to give out dynamic addresses. If you only hand out addresses statically based on MAC address, you can also specify the --mac option. As OpenSolaris more-or-less assumes DHCP, it's recommended to set one up.
Now we need a graphical console in order to interact with the OpenSolaris installer. If the guest domain successfully finished booting the live CD, a VNC server should be running. It has recorded the details of this server in XenStore. This is essentially a name/value config database used for communicating between guest domains and the control domain (dom0). We can start a VNC session as follows:
# domid=`virsh domid domu-220` # ip=`/usr/lib/xen/bin/xenstore-read /local/domain/$domid/ipaddr/0` # port=`/usr/lib/xen/bin/xenstore-read /local/domain/$domid/guest/vnc/port` # /usr/lib/xen/bin/xenstore-read /local/domain/$domid/guest/vnc/passwd DJP9tYDZ # vncviewer $ip:$port
At the VNC password prompt, enter the given password, and this should bring up a VNC session, and you can merrily install away.
Implementation
The live CD runs a transient SMF service system/xvm/vnc-config. If it finds itself running on a live CD, it will generate a random VNC password, configure application/x11/x11-server to start Xvnc, and write the values above to XenStore. When application/graphical-login/gdm starts, it will read these service properties and start up the VNC server. The service system/xvm/ipagent tracks the IPv4 address given to the first running interface and writes it to XenStore.
By default, the VNC server is configured not to run post-installation due to security concerns. This can be changed though, as follows:
# svccfg -s x11-server setprop options/xvm_vnc = "true"
Please remember that VNC is not secure. Since you need elevated privileges to read the VNC password from XenStore, that's sufficiently protected, as long as you always run the VNC viewer locally on the dom0, or via SSH tunnelling or some other secure method.
Note that this works even with a Linux dom0, although you can't yet use virt-install, as the upstream version doesn't yet "know about" OpenSolaris (more on this later).